Take voice command with Dragon Drive!

Companies like Nuance Communications are hard at work releasing effective voice command technology for use in vehicles, extending the development from manufacturers like Mercedes-Benz with its integration of Apple iPhone features with the in-car Audio 20 system via the DriveStyle application.

Nuance Communication’s version is called Dragon Drive The system furthers the maker’s experience with Dragon TV, providing extensive voice command and search abilities from the family television to the car.

The idea is to provide an extended vocabulary for a handsfree interface to vehicle entertainment and information systems. The natural speaking commands and requests are translated by the Dragon Drive system providing what the company claims is a seamless way to access a variety of systems normally controlled by hand.

A crucial differentiation between normal voice control systems and the Dragon Drive! is the natural way the driver can communicate with the interface.  So instead of the semi-shouted and stilted way of delivering word by word commands, Dragon Drive purports to deliver a full sentence style application command mechanism.

Dragon Drive utilises Nuance’s Dragon Dictation and Dragon Go technologies, core to all its products.  So not unlike Siri for the iPhone and other similar smartphone voice systems the Dragon Drive system can be given full sentence command strings such as:

>> "Send a text to Anna Smith, 'I'm stuck in traffic. I'll be at the office as soon as possible.'"
>> "Listen to the email from Alex" to hear text read aloud with Nuance's newly optimised humanlike text-to-speech
>> "Reply to Alex, 'Sushi sounds great. See you at 7.'"

"As connectivity continues to push into the car, bringing with it a host of new services and features, the risk of driver distraction is becoming a key issue for every vehicle manufacturer," said Jack Bergquist, Automotive Analyst, IMS Research.

"Vehicle manufacturers are increasingly turning to natural voice-based interfaces to simplify more complex command tasks and to provide information and data back to the driver in a way that avoids them needing to take their eyes off the road.

"The entire automotive ecosystem faces a critical challenge – keep consumers connected to the content they love, without imposing dangerous distractions behind the wheel," said Arnd Weil, vice president and general manager, automotive, Nuance Mobile. "Dragon Drive has been designed from the ground up with a focus on voice and natural language bridging that gap to give consumers the ability to take full advantage of the broad range of services today's connected car has to offer."

Currently the Dragon Drive Messaging is available in six languages including US and UK English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Additional services, languages and country markets will roll out throughout the year. There is no word at this stage of interest from vehicle manufacturers to integrate Dragon Drive.